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"She needs to get out more."
National Party leader Todd Muller has taken a swipe at Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, after her claims earlier this week that the economy is back on track.
Businesses were "suffering, haemorraghing" and Ardern needed to listen to them, Muller told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking today. "She needs to get out more."
Ardern is being urged to move into alert level 1 immediately in light of criteria in a leaked Cabinet paper that includes a 28-day window of no community transmission.
The most recent such case was reported on April 30 - 34 days ago - but director general of health Ashley Bloomfield has said the last cases of concern were actually from about two months ago.
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and Muller, who quoted the Cabinet paper during Question Time yesterday, both used the community transmission criteria to push for a move to level 1.
Muller told Hosking this morning that the leaked paper about returning to level 1 just "appeared" and its details were "extraordinary".
"This is why Winston Peters has been saying for well over 10 days we should be returning to level 1."
Muller said he believed the economic state of the country had dropped off Labour's radar. Most people had moved to level 1 in their heads already.
Meanwhile, a rent package for small companies that is to be announced this morning would be "suboptimal" and "overly bureaucratic" if it didn't apply to everyone, Muller said.
He believed all businesses should have had support facilitated right from the start, for at least a couple of months, to help with fixed costs rather than just the wage subsidy.
Ardern is standing firm on having D-Day on Monday, June 8, saying there are other factors in the decision.
"Earlier than that would not have given sufficient confidence that transmission was not occurring that has not yet been detected," she said while being questioned by Muller in the House yesterday.
"The incubation period of the virus is up to 14 days; it's only been 13 days since bars reopened and five days since gathering sizes were lifted to 100."
That prompted Muller to question how insufficient confidence squared with Bloomfield's comments that no one in the 4000-person march on Monday needed to self-isolate because there was no evidence of community transmission.
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